A reader and writer fooling with words

Fields of Gold – the origin of prairie

Today is glorious here. It’s only April so temperatures are still hovering around 10 Celcius (50 Fahrenheit for my US readers) but the sky is a clear endless blue and the weeds are growing in my garden. The breeze smells of summer and I spent Saturday planting early vegetable seeds – beetroot and peas outdoors, courgette, cucumber, borlotti beans, basil and peppermint indoors. There will be more to sow in May and June and my tomatoes are already six inches tall on the windowsill behind me as I write this.

My Garden Harvest

With this lovely weather I couldn’t resist investigating an outdoor word and having taken my morning walk today on the local back roads I passed plenty of large open fields, some ploughed for crops, others in grass for livestock. Hence this week’s word is prairie (pronunciation here).

Local sunflower meadow

Most of you probably know that prairie is wide open grassland, typically in North America. I will always associate it with the wonderful children’s book series “Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the television series. Do you recall the little girl running down through the prairie in the opening credits? I think my childhood obsession with having plaits sprouted from that child! Having short curly hair, I never did manage those plaits.

But did you know that prairie is actually a French word dating back to 1682? It originates with an Old French word praierie which in turn comes from the Latin word pratum – meaning meadow.

My own little wildflower corner in the garden – always alive with bees and butterflies

I’ve never been lucky enough to visit the American prairies but I can only imagine that they are much larger than any European meadow. It’s easy enough to imagine French settlers using their own term for grass fields and it catching on for the meadows’ larger cousins.

Until next time happy reading, writing and wordfooling. If you see a meadow, I dare you to run through it – but check for bulls first!

Grace

p.s. I’m still working away on Camp NaNo – ten days to go and plenty still to write.

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One Response

I didn’t know that about the word “prairie”! How cool 🙂 I live in the US, and I can’t say that I’ve ever seen what someone would call a prairie. But if I do find one, I shall run through it…providing I’ve checked for bulls first 😉